Honestly, I can’t say that I’m that happy with how Never Opened turned out. It’s ok, kinda fun in a way but it’s so far away from what I originally had in mind that I find it hard to appreciate it for what it is. It’s a bit like We Love Mind Control Rocket in that the gameplay that’s there is basically what I was able to compromise on and implement at the last minute rather than something I’d carefully planned out or designed. 🙁

Oh well. Live and learn, I guess.

There’s actually another game making contest taking place this weekend, Ludum Dare, which I’m considering taking part in… I feel like it might be a good way to get back into the swing of things 🙂 It’s pretty different from the TIGSource contests – for one, there’s a strict time limit rather than a fuzzy deadline, and it uses a universal world clock – meaning that everyone, from everywhere in the world starts and ends at the same time. For me, that means starting at 4am on Saturday morning.

I dunno about entering that one just yet, though. Will have to think about it a bit more. I won’t know what the actual theme of the contest is it starts, either…

Since I finished with Never Opened I’ve been back working on Detonate – here’s two new screenshots!

I’ve spent most of my time making slight adjustments to the exact rules – it’s still impossible to tell how any significantly complex turn is going to play out, but I think I’m at a point now where you can at least successfully make long term plans. There are two big rule additions that essentially make it work:

(1) A square cannot be “detonated” twice in the same turn – this means that tiles spread out from the detonation point rather than hopping about erratically (you can see that in the second screenshot), and

(2) an enemy square cannot be captured unless it’s from a detonation from a square that has more units than it. That means, for example, that a detonation of 4 beside an enemy unit won’t spread into that square unless there are 4 or less units in it. This means that you can essentially build “walls” of units to protect yourself from an enemy (and vice versa). (you can see that in the first screenshot where the yellow player meets the purple player)

Those are the two big ones, but there are smaller changes too – to detonation order, how units can move, and how many units can be placed in a single square.

(If you’ve never heard of overload and don’t know what I’m talking about, I actually found a mention of it in commodore format which explains the basic concept! You can read it here! You could also check out my old QBasic game Alternate Logic Puzzles which contains an implementation of it. 🙂 )

I know I said that I’d have this finished last weekend (that was before I started working on Never Opened), but I’m not sure I want to put a new deadline on this. I like where it’s going. I’m in no hurry to finish it! 🙂